Lewis And Clark Slept Here Major Expedition Campsite In Rancher’s Back Yard

For 30 years, Pat Deschamps would lean on her corral fence and admire the grassy bench before her and the cottonwoods and creek in the bottomland below.

The point of Lolo Peak, snow-smoothed more months than not, was to her back, overwhelmed by the plenitude of Mormon Ridge.

This place, she knew, was good for the soul. Good for raising children and lambs. Good for growing grass and steers.

What she did not know, through all those years and all that child-rearing and grass-growing, was that her admirably situated, but nonetheless inconspicuous bench was one of the most significant historical sites in Montana.

Until the late spring day a year and a half ago when she got a telephone call from an amateur historian. Did you know, came the question, that your bench is the campsite called Travelers’ Rest? Where the Lewis and Clark Expedition prepared for their trek over the Bitterroot Mountains in 1805 and returned en route back East in 1806?

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Ninety-nine percent sure,” said Chuck Sundstrom, president of the Travelers’ Rest Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.

“As sure as I can be,” said Bob Bergantino, a geologist at the Bureau of Mines and Geology in Butte and an expert on the location of the expedition’s campsites.

“This is all such a surprise to us,” Deschamps said one recent afternoon, the last of the day’s light reaching the corral, her elbows at rest above a row of barbed wire coils on the fence.

All these years, she said, “I saw the Travelers’ Rest sign on the highway and thought that’s where they camped.”

And so, mistakenly, did most others, said Sundstrom. But Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did not camp at the mouth of Lolo Creek, as many previously believed.

Their journals and those of their expeditionary comrades placed Travelers’ Rest at about a mile and a half upstream from the Bitterroot River - on a bench south of and above Lolo Creek, which they called Travelers’ Rest Creek.

The coordinates of latitude and longitude recorded by the expedition match the Deschamps’ place. Clark’s map matches. Survey maps from the 1870s trace the aboriginal trail through the property.

And infrared aerial photographs, taken at the behest of the Travelers’ Rest Chapter in July 1996, revealed two rows of tepee rings on the bench - proof, if not of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, of the ground’s historic use as an Indian campsite.

“There is no way, of course, to have absolute certainty. They didn’t leave a stake in the ground,” said Bergantino. But he has - over the past 25 years - pinpointed the location of every Lewis and Clark campsite from the mouth of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean.

And the Deschamps’ bench marks the expedition’s most likely campsite on Sept. 9, 10 and 11, 1805 - 3,316 miles into their journey from St. Louis to the Pacific, just before the torturous 11-day crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains.

And on their return - on June 30 and July 1, 2 and 3, 1806 - when the expedition made plans at Travelers’ Rest to split, Lewis going north to the Marias River, Clark going south into what is now Yellowstone, meeting again at the mouth of the Little Missouri River.

“If I close my eyes a little and blink out all the development of the past 200 years, I can see a party of people camped here, preparing for the push over the mountains, Lewis studying his instruments, Clark with his maps, Sacagawea with her baby, everyone doing the chores of an expedition,” Bergantino said.

“I see a big six-point bull elk down along the creek, so tame you could get within 300 yards to put a bullet in it,” said Sundstrom. “I feel the first cold of winter coming down off the hillsides and the fear of what might lie ahead, not knowing if there will even be food, knowing that I would rather die than see the expedition fail.”

“It really does give you a different feeling for the property,” said Deschamps.

But it is also hard to believe, she said, “that they were actually here.”

Of course, said husband Ernie Deschamps, for all the imagining of historians and mapmakers like Sundstrom and Bergantino, there is no physical evidence of the expedition - only of the horse corral and steer pasture for which the land has been used these last 30 years.

“Lewis and Clark haven’t been by here lately,” he said.

Only by chance, and for lack of money really, was the below-ground evidence of tepee rings and the abandoned creek channel preserved. Ernie Deschamps never tilled the bottomland; the work was too pricey. So the ground still shows the historic creekbed and its dips and curves and cobbles.

The bench above was likewise left be, used only as a horse corral while the children were still at home, never tilled. Thus the evidence - preserved - of the tepee rings, visible through infrared photography because of the compacted soil.

“The only thing we did was irrigate the pasture,” Ernie Deschamps said. “So we could grow grass.”

Now, of course, Pat and Ernie Deschamps understand the value of keeping their 15 acres untilled and intact. Of the history that happened within the bounds of their corral and creek bottom.

But they know, too, that their children cannot keep the place once they are gone. And that many buyers would be eager to subdivide and develop the land, as has already happened to much of the land in Lolo and the Bitterroot Valley.

So they are working with the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation and Five Valleys Land Trust in Missoula to find a way to intentionally preserve Travelers’ Rest, as they have unintentionally preserved it for the past three decades.

A conservation easement - with protection of the historic resource as its priority - is a possibility. So is sale, someday, to a conservation-minded or history-minded buyer, possibly the heritage foundation, possibly the government, possibly as a visitors’ center and interpretive site.

“That little hunk of land has national importance,” said Greg Tollefson, executive director of Five Valleys Land Trust. “The fact that there is nothing visible to the naked eye makes it all the more intriguing. It’s not that much different than when Lewis and Clark stepped onto that little half-acre.”

And with much of the expedition’s route obliterated by development - municipal or agricultural - Travelers’ Rest is one of the few accessible and yet relatively undisturbed campsites remaining.

The meaning of which is only starting to be revealed to Pat and Ernie Deschamps.

Pat Deschamps is making a scrapbook and has Lewis-and-Clark-inspired visitors sign the inside cover of her newly purchased copy of “Undaunted Courage,” Stephen Ambrose’s bestselling biography of Meriwether Lewis, with its painting of the expedition at Travelers’ Rest on the cover.

She is, admittedly, worried about the potential onslaught of visitors.

Already, her makeshift guest book has the signatures of a handful of amateur historians, geologist-mapmaker Bergantino and a pair of botanists from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

They called and came by last summer, Ernie Deschamps said. To collect plant specimens from along Lolo Creek, as did Lewis and Clark. And to press them for transport back to Philadelphia, as did Lewis and Clark.

The botanists said 3 million people a year visit the display of expedition-collected plants, animals and journals at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Pat Deschamps looked out her kitchen window, down the long driveway to her house, and mouthed a “yikes.”

“It’s all a little bewildering,” she said.

And daunting, said Sundstrom. His chapter of the heritage foundation desperately wants to preserve its namesake campsite, but doesn’t know how or where to find the money. He worries, too, about the Deschamps and their privacy.

The approach of the expedition’s bicentennial has surprised everyone with its early hype and enormous interest. “And it’s going to get bigger and bigger,” Sundstrom said.

“We want,” said Pat Deschamps, “to be able to stay here until we’re too old to take care of ourselves anymore. To enjoy our place as long as possible.

“It would be nice, though, to know that - after we’re gone - this would be a historical center. It would be nice if our kids could come back and say, ‘This is where we grew up.”’